PETAFLOP

Writers

Day 115: New York City (6)

Saturday, 20. October 2007, New York, USA

Of all cities we’ve seen on our travel New York is the only one we would really like to live in. We both have been here several times before and it’s always different. There’s so much to see and the people are the most open minded in the world, they’ve seen it all. New York really is the city of cities, the hub of the world. After seeing that much of the U.S.A. we can surely say: New York is not America.

View from Brooklyn at Lower Manhattan, the south end of the peninsula which was colonised first in the 17th century. Before that Dutch maritime explorer Peter Minuit from Wesel (today Germany) acquired “Manahata” (means island of many hills) from native people in exchange for trade goods worth 60 guilders. The Dutch named the city New Amsterdam until it was conquered by the English in 1664 who renamed it to New York.

On the waterfront: 120 Wall Street (left) und Continental Center (right). The skyscraper canyon on the left is the Wall Street. At that level Dutch governor Petrus Stuyvesant had a rampart built in 1652, through whole Manhattan from the east to the west. The inhabited south ougth to be protected from indian attacks from the north. “Wal” is dutch for rampart, that’s where the name Wall Street comes from.

I wouldn’t say New York is not America. Every country has sparsely populated areas and people with simple lifestyles that co-exist with their stylish modern cities.

Just because there is a simple pig farmer standing in a rice patty somewhere in their vast country doesn’t make Beijing any less Chinese.

The East Coast of the US has several cities that are unmistakeably as American as New York is (just on a much smaller scale, naturally). Most of your journey was not spent on the East Coast, so a visit to New York probably probably did seem very different than, say, staring at the endless cornfields of Nebraska, or gazing across the Grand Canyon. But take a walk through Miami, Atlanta, or Charlotte, and you’re not likely to confuse yourself and think you were in Europe, Japan or Mexico.

Perhaps on a future journey, you (or someone you know) can spend more time in the Southeast…

In Florida, experience a Miami Vice neon bikini party, and then check out the 2-1/2 mile long high-banked race oval built on the sandy beaches of Daytona. Disney World (and SeaWorld and Universal Studios and Discovery Cove) are all located in Orlando, and it’s easy to find airboat rides through the alligator-infested Everglade swamps. Maybe even check out a Space Shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center.

In Georgia, see “America’s Stonehenge” and “The Little White House”, and the New World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. Also, check out a couple of the Old South cotton plantations that are scattered throughout the South, and the very old (for us, anyway) deep south charm of Savannah.

In South Carolina, see Fort Sumter (highlighted in the movie “Glory”), where the opening – and later some of the closing – shots of the American Civil War were fired.

In North Carolina, visit some lighthouses and search for Blackbeard’s long lost pirate treasure in the Outer Banks (and visit Kitty Hawk for the Wright Brothers Memorial and see where man’s first airplane flight took place), and visit RJ Reynold’s 2 million square foot cigarette factory in Winston-Salem (politically incorrect, I suppose, but nonetheless fascinating in it’s sheer scale). To wrap things up, do some hiking in Chimney Rock Park (where the last 20 minutes of the movie “Last Of The Mohicans” was filmed…and yes, the trails along the tops of the cliffs are open to the public).

In Virginia, visit the various shipyards located in the Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth, and Hampton Roads areas…by far the largest concentration of naval shipyards in human history.